While appearing on several talks shows on Sunday, Jay Sekulow, a lawyer from US President Donald Trump’s legal team, denied that Trump was under investigation for firing former FBI director James Comey.
In a tweet yesterday, Trump appeared to confirm that that he
was being investigated for firing former FBI director James Comey.
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the
man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt
6:07 AM - 16 Jun 2017
The Post reported that Robert Mueller, who is overseeing the
FBI’s probe into Russia’s meddling in last year’s US presidential election and
possible links with the Trump campaign, has expanded his inquiry to probe
whether Trump obstructed justice by firing James Comey as FBI chief.
Trump said he was being investigated by the man who, in the
first place, told him to fire James Comey. Trump’s tweet could be targeting
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed former FBI director
Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the probe into Russia’s
intervention into the last year’s presidential polls.
Sekulow, American Center for Law and Justice’s chief counsel,
tried to downplay the content of the tweet and defended Trump’s firing of Comey
as a constitutional act.
On CNN’s “State of the Union”, he said that the tweet in
question was Trump’s response to the Washington Post story that claimed that
Trump was under a possible obstruction of justice probe after firing James
Comey. Sekulow added that the confirmatory tone of Trump’s tweet was due to
Twitter’s word limit, “There's a limitation on Twitter, as we all know. The
President's response was as it related to the Washington Post report. He cannot
in a Twitter statement include all of that in there. That's it. Simple
explanation."
He reiterated his claims on NBC’s “Meet the Press” saying that
Donald Trump “was not and had not been under investigation for obstruction.” He
said that "Donald Trump was not afraid of the investigation — there was no
investigation" and defended Trump’s tweet in question saying that “Donald
Trump is responding to what he's seeing in the media in a way in which he
thinks is appropriate to talk to those people that put him in office.”
“There has been no notification from the special counsel's
office that the president is under investigation,” he told on CBS’ “Face the Nation” programme. Questioning veracity of the Washington Post story, Sekulow
asserted that the President could not be under investigation for doing something
that the Department of Justice asked him to do. In this case, Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein had written to Trump to fire James Comey. Sekulow asserted that “the president could not
be investigated, or certainly could not be found liable for engaging in an
activity he clearly had power to do under the constitution.”
James Comey, who was fired by Trump last month, publicly
testified this month that Trump had told him to ease off on his former national
security adviser Michael Flynn, who was under the FBI investigation for his
Russian links. Comey said he believed Trump’s advice to be a direction and thus
felt uncomfortable by it. Terming Comey’s allegations untrue, Trump later said
he was willing to testify under oath.
